Lament for “The Lost Pardner”

Although absent from Hollywood portrayals of the old West, homosexuality was surely a feature of life on the frontier. “The West,” observe John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman in their history of sexuality, “provided extensive opportunities for male-male intimacy. Some men were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions to men.” Badger Clark was born in 1883 and grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota. His collection of western poems, Sun and Saddle Leather, was not published until the second decade of the 20th century. But the following verse about “The Lost Pardner” suggests a continuing—but largely forgotten—gay presence in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.